Highlights from OpenStack Summit Barcelona

The Trilio team recently attended the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, where we had the opportunity to meet with innovators and leaders from around the globe and explore the future of cloud computing. While the Barcelona Summit was smaller in attendance than Openstack’s Summit held in Austin earlier this year, the content shared was much richer, as was the dialogue that took place throughout the week. Following are some of the key takeaways from the team.

OpenStack is Ready for Primetime

The landscape has matured, and OpenStack has come into its own. This was reflected not only in the content and conversations, but also in new research released in conjunction with the Summit. Cost and flexibility are well known as key benefits to businesses of all sizes working with OpenStack. Now, it’s become more clear than ever that very large environments and workloads are ideally suited for the OpenStack cloud rather than VMware or Hyper-V deployments, reaping great benefits because of both cost and elasticity. For example, a Petabyte workloads will only work in OpenStack clouds because of those factors.

Data Protection is Critical

Data protection, regulation, and privacy were hot topics, particularly as businesses are looking to adhere to the EU’s general protection regulations. There were many times that we heard, “I need backup, yesterday” from attendees during our time in Barcelona. Trilio was the only vendor at the Summit able to meet these needs, which was exciting to us, knowing that we are in a position to help so many.

The global, carrier-grade Telco industry leads in terms of adoption rate and need for data protection as they march towards the rollout of NFV and 5G accelerates. The reality is that data protection should be one of the biggest initiatives on the plate for all companies deploying OpenStack. We’re looking forward to working with all industries as they continue to embrace cloud-based solutions.

Distribution vs “Do It Yourself”

Conference attendees made it clear that they were more comfortable deploying OpenStack from a distribution like Mirantis, Red Hat or HPE with the backing of support, rather than going at it alone, downloading the bytes, deploy OpenStack on their own. This makes sense, as even the most tech savvy may need some level of assistance during their OpenStack journey to ensure that their efforts are completed in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Hybrid Cloud on the Horizon

Another hot topic was the hybrid cloud. The concept of a distributed architecture of on-prem/AWS configuration seemed to pique the interest of many. While this was just the beginning of the dialogue, it’s a conversation worth continuing well beyond the summit to ensure the businesses can leverage the power of OpenStack and the cloud in ways that make the most sense for their businesses.